The snail is necessary the bindweed is necessary

I gaze at my corpse where it lies and I find myself beautiful.

Balancing the World on His Chin The posters advertising movies or dances were not the only ones that occasionally clamored for our attention from Olleros’ walls and tree trunks. Sometimes, too,…

A character knocked on the door of the woman with short hair. Tapping timidly with her knuckles, the character entered the room without making a sound. She’s a modestly dressed mountain woman. On…

“Etel Adnan’s language takes the reader on passages that thread in and out of their own feelings, their own consciousness.”—Diana Abu Jaber

A name engraved on stone isn't much, I have to admit, but it is the name of my relatives and the missing proof of their transatlantic dream.

As far as Bullet and his companions were concerned, these volumes were made of paper, and paper is good for warming their feet.

Amitava Kumar and Michael Ryan edit the Rotten English issue of Politics and Culture. The issue takes its cue from Dohra Ahmad’s book Rotten English: A Literary Anthology. The title of the book…

Hosam Aboul-Ela teaches in the department of English and the program in World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston. He has lived most of his life in two exotic foreign countries—Egypt…

Raport z oblężonego miasta Report from a Besieged City by Cynthia Haven In the final installment in our discussion on Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems Cynthia Haven leads us through Herbert's…

Two newlyweds become enraptured and inseparable in this story by Spanish writer Ray Loriga.

Dialogue and debate on issues surrounding literary translation at talks, workshops, summer schools and residence programmes—along with translation studies courses covering linguistic concepts, theories…

Reading what passes for the interview nowadays, one often wonders if the author has died—and been replaced by their publicist. So when we run across a genuinely-engaged literary conversation in…

Alix Ohlin is the author of The Missing Person, a novel, and Babylon and Other Stories. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania. In her first post for WWB, she talks about her experience at the Château…

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend about literary malaise, or to be more precise, we were talking about malaise in general. We reached the conclusion that there are quite a few different…

Earlier this month, Words Without Borders featured a piece by Lawrence Venuti on the business side of publishing books in translation. Venuti’s article was written for the Frankfurt Book Fair Panel…

The streets of Karachi are alive. Each day, as we drive out, there is something new to see, to read: all the walls around the city are plastered with political slogans, candidate endorsements and poetry…

Whilst writing about English PEN's “Writers in Translation” committee, of which I am a member—tapping into my experiences as an editor, agent and publicist—the idea of doing…

Andrzej Franaszek is a literary critic and cultural editor of the Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. He is the author of Ciemne źródło (Dark Spring), which discusses the subject of suffering…

From to time to time, a Dutch publisher will ask me to write a preface or an afterword to a book he plans to publish. I have written prefaces for authors as different as Machiavelli, Stendhal and Boris…

Alissa Valles was born in Amsterdam to an American father and a Dutch mother. She grew up in the USA and the Netherlands and studied Slavic languages, literature and history at the School of Slavonic…

Translator’s Introduction1. Reflections on the ManhwabangI grew up in South Korea in the 1960s during the Park Chung-hee years, back in the day when comic books, or manhwa, were classified as one…

In these wicked times people aren't interested in wings. Even at two for the price of one.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair, where thousands of publishers from around the world annually squeeze inside huge exhibition halls to buy and sell foreign rights, a typical booth contains several tiny tables…

Magdy El Shafee’s Metro, the first adult Arabic graphic novel, is set in a chaotic modern Cairo pulsing with financial and social insecurity. Shihab, a young software designer who has been forced…

The island lights look like the stars came down from the sky and queued up.